Internet Explorer was up 0.68 points to 55.82 percent. Firefox was back up above 20 percent, growing 0.18 points to 20.12 percent. Chrome was down sharply, losing a surprising 1.21 (giga) points, for a share of 16.27 percent. Safari and Opera were both up slightly, with gains of 0.18 and 0.07 points for a total of 5.42 and 1.82 percent, respectively.

Good news for Internet Explorer, but rather more mixed news for Windows 8. Microsoft's new operating system is growing, but not fast. Its share in February was 2.67 percent, a rise of 0.41 points on a month ago. This makes Windows 8 bigger than any single version of OS X (10.8 is the largest, with a 2.61 percent share), but it's still the smallest supported version of Windows. Even Windows Vista is faring better, with 5.17 percent of the Internet-using public.

As we noted last month, the results are better in certain demographics. According to the Steam Hardware Survey, Windows 8 grew by a total of 0.87 points, taking it to 9.63 percent of that gamer-heavy user base. Among Steam users, this means that Windows 8 has overtaken Windows XP, which has an aggregate of 9.33 percent, though 32-bit Windows XP is still slightly larger than 64-bit Windows 8, with 8.97 percent compared to 8.89 percent.

Just how bad is this? It's not the explosive growth that Microsoft or its OEMs were probably hoping for. On the other hand, it's not altogether surprising given the way the product is positioned. Windows 8 is a consumer play. There are features that are desirable in corporate environments, but Microsoft knows that corporations are still working on ditching Windows XP and continuing their Windows 7 deployments. A company that has only switched to Windows 7 in the last couple of years—much less a company that's still in the process of switching to Windows 7—isn't going to be in any hurry to get Windows 8.

Strong consumer growth, however, needs strong consumer products, and so far these have been lacking. The hybrid devices that mix aspects of the tablet and the laptop are getting better, but they're still not perfect. On the software front, the Windows Store still leaves plenty to be desired, too; Microsoft's built-in applications, especially Mail, remain a serious weakness, and third-party support has been lackluster. Notably absent is any kind of a widely appealing "must-have" touch application.

In the more volatile mobile space, now representing a little over 13 percent of all Web users, Safari remained on top, though it dropped 5.61 points from last month. Internet Explorer is continuing to grow. It's still tiny, but at 1.58 percent, it has now passed Symbian (1.37 percent), BlackBerry (0.96 percent), and Opera Mobile (0.63 percent), putting it within striking distance of Chrome for Android, which in February had a 1.96 percent market share.

Mozilla is showing no ability to reach out to users of old versions of Firefox to get them upgrading. While about three-quarters of the Firefox user base is doing a reasonable job of staying up to date, there's a long tail of obsolete versions, some of them very out of date. These versions are all susceptible to numerous security flaws.

In the early days of Mozilla's post-Firefox 4 releases, there was a period of initial user discomfort due to the way the company had implemented its rapid release process. Firefox extensions would regularly break, and the update process wasn't automatic. Perhaps as a result of this, users chose to ignore updates or refused to install them. This decision might have made some sense at the time, but it's rather harder to justify today.

Internet Explorer 9 and 10 both grew. Over the coming months, many Internet Explorer 9 users should be switched automatically to Internet Explorer 10 thanks to this week's release of Internet Explorer 10 for Windows 7. For the first time, Microsoft is publishing this release as an important update that Windows Update will install automatically on systems using the default configuration.

This isn't going to give Internet Explorer the same kind of rapid uptake that new versions of Chrome manage, but it will nonetheless be a big step in the right direction, helping the adoption of the actually rather good Internet Explorer 10.

Google understandably has plans for Chrome. In a while it will be an OS itself. But as a simple browser that so many adopted in the first place, I don't think its usage will keep growing. Lately too much bloat, features the most users will never use. Every 2-3 versions you might see a useful feature. In the meantime, Fx becomes truly better and IE seems to have awoke ( except the major degradation of the font-rendering on Windows 8 ).

That's it for Chrome. It got its share and now must keep it. A few will come, a few will go back to other browsers again, etc.

The author justifiably highlights desktop Chrome's month-to-month decline, but then claims that mobile IE has made substantial gains when its share is still <2%. Even more striking is when the author chides Firefox for so many users being on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of Firefox yet makes no mention of the enormous amount of desktop IE users still on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of IE, especially IE 6.

The author justifiably highlights desktop Chrome's month-to-month decline, but then claims that mobile IE has made substantial gains when its share is still <2%. Even more striking is when the author chides Firefox for so many users being on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of Firefox yet makes no mention of the enormous amount of desktop IE users still on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of IE, especially IE 6.

Ars Technica, end the pro-Microsoft bias in your articles.

Hi there. You must be new here.

You have to get to know the various writers on Ars. Peter is always going to be pro Microsoft.

At least he's willing to criticize them when they screw something up badly. Some sites have Microsoft guys and gals who won't even do that.

Why did you Blame Windows 8's lackluster sales on businesses? Nobody's buying it, because nobody likes Metro, or "Modern UI" or whatever you wanna call it, I can understand Microsoft not wanting to call it a bust, but a news company? What Ars, do you own Microsoft shares?

The author justifiably highlights desktop Chrome's month-to-month decline, but then claims that mobile IE has made substantial gains when its share is still <2%. Even more striking is when the author chides Firefox for so many users being on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of Firefox yet makes no mention of the enormous amount of desktop IE users still on outdated, potentially unsafe versions of IE, especially IE 6.

Ars Technica, end the pro-Microsoft bias in your articles.

In just about every past article, the lack of updating from IE 6 is mentioned, I think that it gets a bit boring to mention it again and again.

NetMarketShare uses a network of 40,000 test sites to gather data (see http://netmarketshare.com/faq.aspx ). Telling, 76% of their sites participate in pay per click programs to drive traffic to other sites. These are not high quality sites, so the data isn't high quality.

I'm a Mac OS X, thus Safari has been my browser of choice, besting all the applicable competitors; Chrome, Opera, Firefox... etc. But I'd really love to give IE 10 a while. I'm serious. I love Microsoft and would love if they made it available, as is the case for Safari on Windows. I don't see why not; IE has grown considerably and it's become a viable browser, unlike the past iterations.

In the early days of Mozilla's post-Firefox 4 releases, there was a period of initial user discomfort due to the way the company had implemented its rapid release process. Firefox extensions would regularly break, and the update process wasn't automatic. Perhaps as a result of this, users chose to ignore updates or refused to install them. This decision might have made some sense at the time, but it's rather harder to justify today.

No, that is not the only nor the most important reason why people avoid new versions of Firefox.

They avoid them because they bring UI changes and new features and force them as new defaults because Firefox developers are unable to make those UI changes and features discoverable (and thus opt-in) without shoving them down everyone's throat.

To me it is reasonable that people get pissed off when they so often have to change their habits in using something which is for them just a tool to do a certain task. The only other options they have are to waste time trying to figure out how to revert to the previous look, functionality, or behavior or to just stop updating. Guess which one they will choose?

So it doesn't turn out that I am talking nonsense here are the examples of what I am talking about:

1. AwesomeBar -- for months after it was forcibly introduced as a new default there was no way to revert address bar behavior to the previous one.

2. Close buttons on tabs -- only possible to revert to previous behavior using about:config. Again forced as new default.

3. Hidden menus by default -- luckily easy to restore.

4. Removed status bar -- seriously, how dumb is that? Forced, new default, no adequate replacement to this day.

5. Order of "Open Link In New Window" and "Open Link In New Tab" in context menu reversed -- don't they know that people rely on muscle memory? Possible to revert only by using custom userChrome.css settings.

7. Restoring session after crash -- forced new default, many times not working properly and saying it was crashed when it wasn't or restoring all tabs when it shouldn't. Again requires diving into about:config to revert.

8. Switch to tab -- most idiotic option ever added as a new default. As if they never had a need to have the same page opened twice. Again forced on everyone and not possible to completely disable it.

9. PDF preview in Firefox -- again forced as new default to everyone, even those who had specifically selected the application in which they want PDF opened. Blatant disregard of user preferences just to make a new "feature" visible.

I could go on like this, but I hope you get the point. They are doing the promotion of UI changes and new features in a totally wrong way, and it shows -- people refuse to update because they are sick of having to adjust their habits or dig through about:config and userChrome.css or hunt for new extensions with every browser release in order to get things back to way they liked them.

edit: If you disagree with what I said above, could you please provide counter-arguments instead of down-voting the post? Thanks.

I would have left Chrome for IE10 if it wasn't for the ten or so extensions that I don't want to go without. The touch performance is so much better in IE10. At the moment Chrome doesn't even support pinch zoom in Windows. They are hard at work on it, but it just got pushed back to Chrome 27, and may get pushed again.

@igor.levicki is absolutely right. I have to hack Firefox with every install. PITA.But Chromium has problems too. I hate Facebook. I block it in /etc/hosts. Chromium nags me about it constantly. Worse, the nags cover legit content. So I only use Chromium for a few sites, like Bloomberg, that look bad in Firefox. IMHO it's because those sites are still building their pages for IE-that's their fault, not Firefox's.Google, stop nagging me about Facebook! If a site returns nothing, the correct thing to put on the webpage from that site is...nothing.

Under the mobile charts, the text specifically names Chrome for Android, but Chrome is also available for iOS. (I use Chrome for iOS.) Is the 1.96 percent market share figure representative of Chrome for Android only or all mobile versions of Chrome?

Perhaps I missed it in just the skimming I did of the article, but I'm going to nitpick anyhow:

Peter, do you not mean Internet Explorer in the title? You said Windows 8 so I was assuming this article was not a browser market share comparison, but an operating system market share comparison. I'm sure the correlations between the statistics are similar, however browsers and operating systems are still two different beasts, or has that finally changed?

In the early days of Mozilla's post-Firefox 4 releases, there was a period of initial user discomfort due to the way the company had implemented its rapid release process. Firefox extensions would regularly break, and the update process wasn't automatic. Perhaps as a result of this, users chose to ignore updates or refused to install them. This decision might have made some sense at the time, but it's rather harder to justify today.

No, that is not the only nor the most important reason why people avoid new versions of Firefox.

They avoid them because they bring UI changes and new features and force them as new defaults because Firefox developers are unable to make those UI changes and features discoverable (and thus opt-in) without shoving them down everyone's throat.

The Firefox UI has basically not changed since 4.0. This is not the reason that people are sticking to obsolete post-4.0 versions.

Under the mobile charts, the text specifically names Chrome for Android, but Chrome is also available for iOS. (I use Chrome for iOS.) Is the 1.96 percent market share figure representative of Chrome for Android only or all mobile versions of Chrome?

FYI: Chrome on iOS is just Safari with a different skin and without fast javascript(!)... (no V8 or chrome's webkit) cause apple forbids it all...so it makes sense to classify all browsers on iOS as safari mobile.

They avoid them because they bring UI changes and new features and force them as new defaults because Firefox developers are unable to make those UI changes and features discoverable (and thus opt-in) without shoving them down everyone's throat.

It feels like Firefox is developed in a vacuum where they too often act like there is no existing user base.

I think it could use some more attention from user experience designers. Why not have it bring up an options wizard when upgrades happen, so people can choose their new defaults? Do you want to try out the awesome bar? Do you want to try out our new PDF viewer? Then they need to let people know where to go to revert to the old behavior (somewhere other than about:config) if they don't like the new "features." There are changes where you can't feasibly maintain the old behavior and develop the new one as well (e.g. Microsoft Office Ribbon UI), but the application should at least provide a brief introduction to what's changed when these things happen. People aren't going to go hunting for release notes.

That said, if you want less frequent change then there are still very viable options in the Mozilla family. I use SeaMonkey as my main browser, and by design it is less volatile than the Firefox it is based on. Firefox of course also has the "extended support" version which will offer changes beyond important security fixes in much slower but larger chunks.

I stopped using pie charts after regular requests to do so. There has been some talk in the orbiting headquarters of replacing them with stacked graphs. So here are some rough layouts: which would you guys prefer. The current bar charts, or something like:

oror

The formatting is just some Excel default, so I'm asking more about the presentation style than the colour scheme. Though if you all love the colour scheme that is an option too.

FYI: Chrome on iOS is just Safari with a different skin and without fast javascript(!)... (no V8 or chrome's webkit) cause apple forbids it all...

FYI: Chrome on iOS actually uses a significant amount of the Chromium core, including for example the Chromium network stack. And the UI actually has different functionality, not just a different appearance. Some people prefer the omnibox and Chrome's tab-handling behavior.

This isn't going to give Internet Explorer the same kind of rapid uptake that new versions of Chrome manage, but it will nonetheless be a big step in the right direction, helping the adoption of the actually rather good Internet Explorer 10.

Until it has AdBlock (and no, I don't mean the $50 one), it's not "actually rather good," it's "utter garbage," period.

Just how bad is this? It's not the explosive growth that Microsoft or its OEMs were probably hoping for.

The big mistake most Internet pundits make today is in using percentages to describe critical comparison values. Indeed, "10%" doesn't mean today what it meant a decade ago, or a decade before that. Software companies generally make money per copy, and "10%" market share now can mean exponentially greater dollar profits than "10%" did even just five years ago. If we want to get real, then percentages have to go because at best they can be highly misleading. Especially "Steam survey" percentages...

However, an actual Steam-survey percentage that I find interesting, is that despite Gabe Newell's odd new-found love affair with Linux (Ubuntu 12.04+, to be precise), and his strange, irrational panic over Windows 8, Windows 8 represents a far more lucrative market for Valve right now than does Linux. (Unless something dramatic has happened since I last bothered to look at Steam-survey stuff, and you don't mention Linux on Steam one way or another.)

I have been using Chrome since it's inception. I tried using Firefox and Opera, but felt IE was just easier to use in those days. When Chrome came, it changed the game, more real estate, simple interface, a clean look and fast speeds convinced me to move to Chrome. Lately however, I have constant crashes, and it just feels slower and bloated. IE on the other side has become more stable and taken Chrome's most desirable features. IE 9 is just as good with a lot less crashes.

The main reason I don't use Chrome (Firefox primarily) may seem petty--I don't like Google update. Indeed, I don't like any software in my system that runs even after I have told it not to run. The moment I reboot a system Google update runs again, anyway, which reminds me of nothing so much as malware. So off comes Chrome. And then Google update obediently goes away.

The reason I still prefer Firefox (32-bits) over 64-bit IE is because of one particular feature I like very much and always use in Firefox that IE seems not to have: Zoom Text Only When IE zooms it also zooms page images and bitmaps which makes them look pretty bad. Have I simply missed this in IE somewhere? It's just so much better when I ctrl + to make the text on a page larger (or ctrl - to make text smaller) that the images all retain their original size.

They avoid them because they bring UI changes and new features and force them as new defaults […] shoving them down everyone's throat.

FYI: exactly what every app (& browser) developer does.

igor.levicki wrote:

To me it is reasonable that people get pissed off when they so often have to change their habits in using something which is for them just a tool to do a certain task. The only other options they have are […] to just stop updating.

Certainly. People still use Windows XP or heaven forbid 98. Though another option would be to adapt.Science says the humans species has the best adaptability in behavior but sometimes i wonder if there is a subspecies lacking that ability... Security experts & web developers would rejoice at their extinction...

igor.levicki wrote:

[…] examples of what I am talking about:2. Close buttons on tabs […]3. Hidden menus by default […] 4. Removed status bar […]5. Order of "Open Link In New Window" and "Open Link In New Tab" in context menu reversed […]6. Closing last tab closes browser […]7. Restoring session after crash […]

As you say these are revertable in prefereces, about:config or userChrome.css. Be glad, that's more than what you get in other browsers/applications... but what is Firefox's best known feature? There is an Extension for that.

igor.levicki wrote:

1. AwesomeBar […]8. Switch to tab […]9. PDF preview in Firefox […]

Quite sure these can be reverted by installing/writing an extension. heck you can even copy 90% of the code from an older version of firefox.While i don't fancy the last i think the others are either cosmetical or a serious improvement...

igor.levicki wrote:

[…] with every browser […]

Before version 4 it used to be that each new version introduced large changes, but that is no longer the case... In fact each version brings only very minor changes. Heck i have written (& currently installed 25) userstyles targeting the chrome and in a year i had to update exactly one.

igor.levicki wrote:

If you disagree with what I said above, could you please provide counter-arguments instead of down-voting the post? Thanks.

People like giving simplistic single click opinions. At least ars supports like AND dislike

Quite sure these can be reverted by installing/writing an extension. heck you can even copy 90% of the code from an older version of firefox.While i don't fancy the last i think the others are either cosmetical or a serious improvement...

While I like the locationbar, Mozilla forcing "Switch to tab" and "PDF preview" down everyone's throat is just so wrong. Especially "switch to tab", which is really really useless. I just hope they're going to outsource it into an addon, just like they're doing with Panorama.

Plus, while you can revert the changes regarding PDF within the options, you absolutely have to install an addon to get rid of "Switch to tab". Not cool.

Kamina wrote:

I have been using Chrome since it's inception. I tried using Firefox and Opera, but felt IE was just easier to use in those days.

Of course, because then-uptodate IE7 couldn't do squat. Not hard to use something which can't do anything.

Perhaps I missed it in just the skimming I did of the article, but I'm going to nitpick anyhow:

Peter, do you not mean Internet Explorer in the title? You said Windows 8 so I was assuming this article was not a browser market share comparison, but an operating system market share comparison. I'm sure the correlations between the statistics are similar, however browsers and operating systems are still two different beasts, or has that finally changed?

Meh, I see IE's mentioned in the byline... it's all good in the hood.

I believe that refers to the Steam hardware survey referenced in the article. The Steam data shows a very anemic uptake of Windows 8 on the desktop.

I stopped using pie charts after regular requests to do so. There has been some talk in the orbiting headquarters of replacing them with stacked graphs. So here are some rough layouts: which would you guys prefer. The current bar charts, or something like:...The formatting is just some Excel default, so I'm asking more about the presentation style than the colour scheme. Though if you all love the colour scheme that is an option too.

I actually think the horizontal stack is good, except for the obvious problem of smooshing numbers together as their segments get smaller.

I stopped using pie charts after regular requests to do so. There has been some talk in the orbiting headquarters of replacing them with stacked graphs. So here are some rough layouts: which would you guys prefer. The current bar charts, or something like: […]

The formatting is just some Excel default, so I'm asking more about the presentation style than the colour scheme. Though if you all love the colour scheme that is an option too.

I'm mostly for the pie chart, although the horizontal bar is as nice. But please make the the text/numbers larger. Thanks.